Some politicians try to win popular support by misleading people with lies and statistics, hoping that they will escape detection.
The campaign leading up to the 2016 British referendum on whether or not to leave the EU (the so-called ‘Brexit’ decision) provided some egregious examples; politicians used competing conjectures to suit their arguments, presenting them as ‘facts’. AOL reported examples of malpractice on both sides of the Brexit debate: Truth is the first casualty of EU referendum, experts say. The ways in which Boris Johnson and others misled public opinion during the Brexit campaign are described later (6.6.5.8) and in several blog posts on this website.
Donald Trump is known to be a serial liar:
· His false claim that he won the 2020 election was referred to earlier (6.3.2.6).
· His disregard for the truth is an aspect of his narcissistic personality (6.3.4.2): he says what he wants to be true.
· CNN reported that Trump makes more than 20 false claims in RNC acceptance speech in July 2024, on such items as tax, inflation, gas prices and levels of crime.
Statistics can be misleading. Interpretations of past data can be partly conjectural, because they often include some assumptions in their calculations. And correlations are not a proof of cause and effect: people are now living longer than they did when Britain joined the EU, but that statistic doesn’t prove that EU membership prolongs people’s lives.
Statistics almost always contain assumptions and interpretations, and they can be selectively quoted. A UCL study, The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK, was quoted by two newspapers to say that EU migrants contribute £20bn to Britain – but two other newspapers used a different part of the study, in a way that its authors described as “misleading”, to report that migrants were a heavy financial burden. The Guardian explained the discrepancies in a report entitled It’s simply incorrect to say migrants represent a huge cost to Britain.
Self-interest guides the politicians' choice of which statistics to quote. And unscrupulous politicians tell outright lies – as noted in an article in The Guardian entitled Post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are no joke.
(This is an archive of a page intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. The latest versions are at book contents).